[Advaita-l] saMkShepa rAmAyaNa 10 - phalashruti

[Venkatesh Murthy]

Namaste

Kindly see the Ramayana translation of Makhan Lal Sen. He has commonly
translated Vanara as Vanara only and not monkey.

These are the statistics in his translation of Yuddha Kanda -

Vanara word appears 592 times

Monkey word appears only 6 times

Full text of "Ramayana: Translated From The Original Of Valmiki Vol.3"
(archive.org)
<https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.528978/2015.528978.ramayana-translated_djvu.txt>

In Kishkindha and Sundara Kandas the statistics are

Vanara is used 373 times
Monkey is used 17 times
Full text of "The Ramayana Vol.2, Ed.2nd" (archive.org)
<https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.148293/2015.148293.The-Ramayana-Vol2-Ed2nd_djvu.txt>

It appears Vanaras were superior and different from monkeys. But monkeys
were also living with Vanaras and working under them.


On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 12:25 PM <jaldhar at braincells.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 11 Apr 2022, Venkatesh Murthy via Advaita-l wrote:
>
> > I have seen many discussions about the translation of 'Vanara'. Many
> people
> > feel it should not be translated as 'Monkey'. Vanaras are not the same
> > species as monkeys. They are closer to humans than monkeys.
> >
>
> vAnara literally means "forest man" but the conventional meaning is
> monkey.  The rAmAyaNa itself using kapi (see shloka 77) and harI (shloka
> 68) as synonyms for vAnara and both mean monkey.  Furthermore the Gujarati
> word vAMdro and the Hindi word bandara which both derive from vAnara both
> mean monkey.
>
> A sufficiently enterprising person can "interpret" any word into any other
> but when there is an accepted common-sense meaning it should be accepted
> instead of torturing texts.
>
> --
> Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com>
>


-- 
Regards

-Venkatesh